Design Issues

You should be aware that several different iProcess processes will call the UVAPI package while the TIBCO iProcess Engine is running. This can cause problems if the UVAPI package is not designed correctly. The example application provides a good example of this.

The user information is stored in the text file and each iProcess process that uses the UVAPI package loads the contents of the text file into a memory cache. However, these caches are specific to each session and to each iProcess process. Therefore, when an iProcess user causes its iProcess process to perform a change password action, that process updates the main text file and the processes’ cache.

This means that other iProcess processes (including the one that validates iProcess passwords) will still be using the original cached copy of the data in the text file. Therefore, the example UVAPI does not reflect a changed password until the iProcess system is shutdown and restarted. This is the only way that all the processes can re-cache the user information.

To avoid this problem, you need to design the UVAPI package as a set of interfaces that communicate with a single server process that maintains the user information, ensuring that any changes to the user information is made available to all the iProcess processes using the UVAPI package.